The Final Struggle

After each 'action,' the shtetl took on the look of a village fair. Some peasants came to determine the remaining number of living Jews, while others came simply to steal whatever they could from the emptied and not yet demolished homes. In the Pre-Passover 'action' (April of 1943), many murdered Jews created unintended “beneficiaries” among the hundreds who had undertaken to hide Jewish possessions. Every Jewish death instantly enriched a local “helper.”

In those final bloody days, when the last of the last were about to be exterminated, the remaining Jews of Skalat were crowded into thirty small houses. The passageways of streets and alleys were boarded up. The handful of remaining exhausted Jews lived in the most awful congestion and filth, above ground as well as below in bunkers. Every day and every hour of every day the Jews in the shtetl lived in mortal fear, anticipating the inevitable liquidation of the ghetto and their deaths.

The population consisted almost entirely of women and children, widows and orphans of previous 'actions.' A small number of surviving men could be found in the Skalat Camp and in the other camps in the area. In fact, the town of Skalat was to have been declared Judenfrei ^[59] following the mass murder during the “Sobbing Graves” 'action' in April of 1943. However, since a sufficiently large number had managed to hide, an order came from Tarnopol permitting the surviving Jews to return to the ghetto. Again they were told that they would be permitted to live there peacefully. Most importantly, they were to maintain their strength and sanitation, as they would still be needed as laborers. To encourage them further to believe that they would not be killed, the Tarnopol Gestapo sent down ten Jewish policemen, led by one Aba Tennenbaum, assigned to maintain Law and Order and, at the same time, to serve as tools in the execution of the Germans' plans.

The Jewish police from Tarnopol exerted themselves to instill calm and to persuade the people that as long as they were around there would be no new slaughters. This time, however, no one believed them. Every evening, an exodus would begin. As night came on, people sought out lodgings among the Gentiles or crept stealthily into barns and stables to spend the night. At dawn, learning that all was quiet in the town; they would return to the ghetto, only to roam again the next night. Frequently, during those wanderings, the Jews would be robbed and beaten, and the women raped by street toughs and merciless peasant youths.

The ghetto was emptied of many people every night. Those who remained would gasp for breath all night in their underground hideaways, barely surviving until morning, when they would learn that no, 'action' was taking place that day. Then God's creatures would slip back into the ghetto from the fields and other 'secret places' on the other side: their will to live unabated, though their expected life-span was not much longer than a butterfly's. The police searched the empty houses during the nights, taking whatever they liked of the furnishings, and also taking the opportunity to locate and note down suspected hiding places or bunkers.

Generally, the Jewish police from Tarnopol behaved abominably. In addition to maintaining close relations with the officials of the local camp and with the Germans, they engaged in drunken revelry, robbery and rape.

Thus the last of the Skalat Jews lived out the final days of their lives. There is a story from those days of a certain town idiot named Yosele, who had somehow managed to escape the various 'actions.' One day he was seen standing in the empty street sobbing piteously. “Why are you crying, Yosele?” he was asked. “No one throws stones at me. No one chases me. Nobody calls me names,” he moaned. Yosele, the idiot, yearned for the 'good old days' when there were Jews alive, when Jewish children would chase him through the streets - their taunts echoing and the stones flying.

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The lives of those miraculously missed during the previous 'actions,' still flickered. But the question remained: how were they to be rescued from the sentence of death?

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